Your living room television might soon double as an AI data harvester. Web data aggregator Bright Data has been quietly pitching streaming service operators on a controversial new monetization model - one that turns Samsung and LG smart TVs into web crawlers that scrape data for AI training, according to a report from The Verge's Lowpass newsletter. The pitch promises streaming apps an escape from the brutal choice between ad-supported tiers and premium subscriptions, but it raises alarming questions about consumer consent and device ownership.
The streaming wars just took a dystopian turn. Bright Data, a web intelligence company specializing in data aggregation, has been approaching streaming service operators with a proposition that sounds ripped from a Black Mirror episode - turn millions of Samsung and LG smart TVs into a distributed web crawling network for AI data harvesting.
According to reporting by Janko Roettgers in The Verge's Lowpass newsletter, the pitch targets apps running on Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS platforms. Instead of forcing users to choose between expensive ad-free tiers or sitting through commercials with invasive tracking, streaming services could tap into a third revenue stream - one that monetizes the very device sitting in your living room.
The model is deceptively simple. Streaming publishers integrate Bright Data's technology into their smart TV apps, and those apps quietly use idle TV processing power and your home internet connection to crawl websites and harvest data. That data then gets packaged and sold to companies training large language models and other AI systems hungry for massive datasets. You get your content without ads or premium fees. The streaming service gets paid. And Bright Data gets to build what amounts to the world's largest residential proxy network without anyone explicitly signing up for it.
